


Mac and Dennis Move Forward

by kaivevo



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Brief homophobia, Found Family, Getting Together, M/M, Post s14, domestic bliss babey, extremely inexplicit mentions of sex, extremely vague and ambiguous mention of a suicide attempt, two assholes raise a kid and become better people, usage of the f slur, whether or not it was even an actually suicide attempt is up to the reader to decide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:22:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22950043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaivevo/pseuds/kaivevo
Summary: “It’s like this,” Mac explained. “Dennis has been kinda sad lately, you know? It’s… he has this thing, he calls it his God Hole, and he’s trying to use this kid to fill it up. But he’s way more dumber than I thought because he alreadytriedthat, and it didn’twork. And it’s so annoying because he still doesn’t realize that the person who’s gonna fill his hole is right in front of him.” He gestured to himself, just in case his point wasn’t clear. Charlie’s face lit up in realization.“Ohhh, okay, that’s what this is about,” he said. “You want to fill Dennis’s hole.”Mac coughed. “No, that’s— that’s not what I meant, don’t say it like that.”
Relationships: Mac McDonald/Dennis Reynolds
Comments: 19
Kudos: 154





	Mac and Dennis Move Forward

**Author's Note:**

> here have the most obnoxiously long oneshot ever courtesy of my macden brainworms

“Were you planning on helping, at any point?” Dennis asked, in that shrill, passive-aggressive tone he usually reserved for Dee. Mac took another swig of beer and tilted his head to see past him to the TV. “Or are you just gonna sit on your ass while I do everything?”

Mac didn’t think he’d ever seen Dennis so worked up before; normally, he’d handle stressful situations with ridiculous overconfidence or by ignoring them completely, but this… this was Charlie-levels of frantic, nervous energy. Maybe Dennis had just never _cared_ about anything so much before. Mac threw back the rest of his Corona bitterly.

“Helping with what?” he asked. “It looks fine to me.” Dennis threw his hands up.

“Are you kidding? Have you seen the state of this place?” he seethed. “I just found a broken bottle under the rug in the entryway. Your… disgusting freak bike is in the middle of the _kitchen_. Just— just move it, okay? Even if it’s the only thing you ever do with your useless, miserable life, please put your fucking dildo bike somewhere my five year old kid won’t see it.”

Mac rolled his eyes and stood up. “Whatever, dude,” he said, tossing his beer bottle into the sink, where it exploded brilliantly. Dennis gaped at him. “I didn’t sign up for this, I don’t think I should be responsible for baby-proofing my apartment.”

“ _Your_ apartment? Your apartment that you don’t pay rent or utilities for, is that the one you’re referring to?” Dennis hissed. “Just… get out of here. Go away. They’ll be here in, shit, _two hours_ , I don’t have time for this.”

It had been like this for the past few weeks, now. Ever since Dennis had dropped the bomb on him that Mandy and the kid were coming to Philly, again, permanently this time, they’d been at each other’s throats. Mac was so sick of this, sick of his life being upended every time Dennis felt like making another dramatic, life-changing decision. He’d already chosen the stupid kid once, and then realized that decision had been the wrong one. Mac didn’t understand why the hell he’d go back on it now.

“Uh, I dunno, man,” Charlie replied offhandedly when Mac voiced these thoughts aloud. He’d lost his patience with Dennis’s insane micromanaging and was now settled in the cleanest square foot of Frank and Charlie’s apartment that he could find. “You know how your dad was never around and it bums you out and stuff? Maybe Dennis just doesn’t want that for his kid, y’know?”

Mac scoffed. “Charlie, that’s totally different,” he said, waving him off. “My dad _wanted_ to be there for me, but he couldn’t, because he was locked up. Dennis was perfectly capable of staying in North Dakota. He just realized his kid sucked and came back.”

“…Right,” Charlie said.

“But,” Mac continued, undeterred. “If my dad _didn’t_ give a shit about me, like Dennis with his kid, I think I’d rather he’d just… not even tried, you know? Like, then I’d never have hope, I’d just accept the fact that I didn’t have a dad. Like you, you never had a dad, and you’re fine, right? That’s way better than having one who’s around but never really _around_.”

Charlie stared at him blankly for a moment, before sighing. “But, dude, have you considered that Dennis doesn’t hate the kid? Because I think maybe he doesn’t.”

Mac scowled and stood up. “Look, you just don’t get it, okay? You don’t get him. I’m the only one who _gets_ Dennis,” he said. “Just me. Not you, not Mandy, and certainly not that little shithead. I know exactly what’s going on here.”

“Alright. Sure,” Charlie said, clearly giving up.

“It’s like this,” Mac continued as if he hadn’t said anything. “Dennis has been kinda sad lately, you know? It’s… he has this thing, he calls it his God Hole, and he’s trying to use this kid to fill it up. But he’s way more dumber than I thought because he already _tried_ that, and it didn’t _work_. And it’s so annoying because he still doesn’t realize that the person who’s gonna fill his hole is right in front of him.” He gestured to himself, just in case his point wasn’t clear. Charlie’s face lit up in realization. 

“ _Ohhh_ , okay, that’s what this is about,” he said. “You want to fill Dennis’s hole.”

Mac coughed. “No, that’s— that’s not what I meant, don’t say it like that.”

“That’s exactly what you said, bro.”

“Yeah but it’s, it’s not a real hole. It’s metaphorical,” Mac said frustratedly. “Never mind. You don’t get it. You’ll never get it.”

Charlie shrugged and went back to pouring school glue into a paper bag. “I think I do, though,” he muttered.

It was after midnight by the time Mac got back to his place. He was relieved to see that the lights were off and it was quiet, a sign that all of its occupants were already asleep. He wasn’t in the mood for confrontation or playing nice. He’d deal with that in the morning.

It had been different, the last time Mandy and the kid had been there. Dennis didn’t want them, the plan had been to get _rid_ of them, and Mac had been more than happy to help. It was fun, it was a scheme, it was just the usual destructive shenanigans they always got up to. He’d even been excited at the prospect of raising Dennis’s kid together; that was, until he realized that Dennis wanted that too, just without the “together” part.

Last time, Mac hadn’t been the slightest bit concerned that Dennis would ever choose these people over the gang. Over him. This time, though, he knew better.

He paused in the living room as he caught sight of Dennis, curled up uncomfortably on the couch. He’d been half expecting him to steal his room, or worse, offer it to Mandy and the kid, leaving Mac to be the one to fend without a bed. Mac sighed, going into his room to get his blanket. He never used it in the summer, anyway, and Dennis always seemed to be cold.

“Mm. Mac?” Dennis muttered, stirring as Mac threw the thick blanket over him. He cracked one eye open. “You’re home.”

“Yep,” Mac said. “‘Night, man.” Dennis didn’t respond, already passed out once again.

He woke up the next morning to the rare sound of activity outside his door. Their kitchen almost never saw any use, considering the fact that Mac knew how to make exactly one thing and it was hard enough to get Dennis to eat most days, let alone cook. He stared at his ceiling for awhile, mentally preparing himself for whatever was waiting for him out there. It wasn’t until his stomach started growling from the smell of bacon that he hauled himself out of bed.

“Now there he is!” Mandy greeted in that grating voice of hers the moment he opened the door. She had him encased in a hug before he even had time to react. “It’s so good to see ya, Mac. Thanks for letting me and Junior stay again.”

It was way too early to handle her volume level. “Yeah,” he responded neutrally, grabbing a cup of coffee and pointedly avoiding eye contact with everyone.

“Junior, you remember Mr. Mac, right? Can you say hello?” Mandy continued cheerfully, placing a plate of food in front of him as he sat down.

There was a pause. “Hi, Mr. Mac,” a tiny little baby voice eventually spoke up from across the table. Mac allowed himself a glance. The kid was a lot bigger than the last time he’d seen him. It had been what, two years since then? Three? That entire time was a blur, seeing as Mac hated thinking about it or talking about it or acknowledging that it even happened.

“You couldn’t have put on pants before you came out here?” Dennis said exasperatedly. Mac glanced down at his boxers with a shrug. “Whatever, never mind. Do me a favor when you get to the bar and tell the guys I won’t be in today.”

Mac scoffed. “Sure,” he said. “We’ll pick up your slack, no problem.”

“Sla— Mac, none of us do any work, ever,” Dennis replied flatly. “Give me a break.”

“So sorry about stealing Dennis from ya,” Mandy chimed in, and the words made Mac briefly consider shoving his thumbs in her eye sockets. “But we gotta get Junior enrolled in school as soon as possible. Not to mention I need to start lookin’ for a job in the city.”

Mac thought he should probably figure out the details of this situation at some point, but he was frankly dreading that conversation, so he just shot her a thumbs up.

“She still calls the kid Junior. It’s insane,” Mac said later at the bar, already five beers in at 2pm. “He’s not a junior! Dennis’s name is not fucking Brian LeFevre! What kind of deranged, sick person names their one-night-stand baby after the absent father, anyway?”

“God, are we really having this conversation again?” Dee asked tiredly. “I’m sick of hearing you rant about the same thing, over and over, every single day. Who cares? She and the kid are both Dennis’s problem, it has nothing to do with us.”

“Uh, there’s two people I barely know squatting at my place, it kind of has to do with me,” Mac snapped back, chugging down the rest of his beer. “I didn’t realize I was paying the rent for a daycare center.”

“Do you even pay rent?” Charlie chimed in. Mac flipped him off.

“Well, you’re not gonna have to worry about it for that much longer. They’ve already started looking at places,” Dee said. 

Mac froze. That was news to him. “They’re… looking at places?” he repeated slowly. “Dennis didn’t tell me that.”

Dee snorted. “Uh, duh. What, you thought the four of you were gonna live together in that little shithole place forever?” she said. “I mean, you should be happy, right?”

“Yeah,” Mac said. “Thrilled.”

Mac knew, reasonably, that it wasn’t so much that Dennis didn’t tell him than that Mac hadn’t asked. In fact, after the initial _Mandy and the kid are moving to Philly permanently_ conversation, Mac hadn’t spoken to Dennis much at all. He knew he was being a dick, but he didn’t care, he just couldn’t get over it. They’d been doing better. Mac had been starting to move past Dennis leaving in the first place, and Dennis had been getting a little less sad and a little more nicer with every passing day. But then that stupid kid had to come around and fuck everything up _again_.

He just wanted things to stay the same as they’d always been. Well, he wanted Dennis to stay the same. Mac would like to think he, personally, had changed for the better in recent years, what with him no longer pretending he was into chicks and all. Also, he’d really like to get married someday soon, and maybe adopt a kid of his own and start a family. But he’d give Dennis a proper heads up before that happened, obviously. It was just common courtesy.

He hadn’t really meant to say any of that out loud to Dennis, but, well. If he was five beers in at 2pm, it went without saying that he’d be plastered by the time he got home that night, and not exactly in control of what came out of his mouth.

“Jesus _Christ_ , dude,” Dennis hissed, scrubbing a hand over his face. It was late enough that Mandy and the kid were already asleep, so Dennis was attempting to whisper and keep Mac quiet, neither of which were very successful. “You’re embarrassing yourself. Go to bed.”

“No, fuck you!” Mac replied loudly. “You can’t keep putting me through this, bro, this is… it’s my life too and you’re just… you’re ruining everything.”

Dennis gaped at him. “I’m sorry, it’s _your life too_?” he asked in disbelief. “No, Mac, it isn’t! I don’t know what the hell you think is going on here, but you’re just my _roommate_ , you don’t get a say in what I do with my life or how I raise my kid.”

Mac bristled immediately. “I’m _just your roommate?_ ” he asked in disbelief. Dennis rolled his eyes.

”Yes, Mac, that’s right,” he said flatly. “What did you think you were? My boyfriend?” Mac recoiled.

“Oh, fuuuck you, dude. Don’t do that. Don’t make this a… a gay thing,” he said, genuinely pissed now. “Stop being an egomaniac for five minutes, that’s not what this is about.”

“ _I’m_ the egomaniac? You’re the one who thinks my entire fucking life should revolve around you!” Dennis snapped, clearly giving up on volume control. “You just want me to depend on you forever and never move on!”

“Because every time you move on you leave me behind!” Mac yelled back. Dennis was quiet, and Mac ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “It’s like… it’s like I’m your closet.”

Dennis stared at him blankly. “What?” he asked, clearly perplexed. Mac sighed.

“You know… I was in the closet, and it sucked, and I was miserable,” he muttered. Dennis’s face slowly changed as he started to understand. “And I was never gonna be happy for real until I left it behind. I think… I think that’s how you feel about me. Because every time you see the chance to get rid of me you take it.”

Dennis let out a long, slow exhale, sitting on one of the kitchen chairs and putting his face in his hands. “Dammit, Mac. I don’t know what you want,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I came _back_ from North Dakota. I’m not asking you to leave like I did when I married Maureen. How you’re even making this situation about you _at all_ , it’s just, it’s beyond me.”

Mac flopped down onto the couch, face first, and groaned into the pillow. “I could fill your hole,” he muttered, his voice muffled.

“What?” Dennis asked. Mac waved him off. He closed his eyes, exhaustion catching up with him as he sunk deeper into the cushions. Dennis sighed exasperatedly. “Whatever, just… get up. Go to bed.”

Mac didn’t answer him, throwing in a snore for good measure. He listened to Dennis bitch and moan for a few more moments before he eventually gave up and went to sleep in Mac’s room. Mac waited until the door was closed before he shifted, trying to find a comfortable position on the beaten-down sofa. If he remembered correctly, they’d found it on the side of the road when they were first moving in all those years ago. Sleeping on it for several nights in a row was just asking for back problems.

The next time he opened his eyes the sun wasn’t even fully risen in the sky yet, and he had a throbbing headache. “Mac,” a voice was whispering harshly in his ear, but it may as well have been screaming. “Mac, hey, listen. I need you to watch Brian for a little bit.”

Mac would have laughed if he wasn’t half awake and in a fair amount of pain. “Fuckin’... no,” he muttered, turning his face into the back of the couch. Dennis sighed exasperatedly, shaking his shoulder.

“Dude, come on, I really need you,” he hissed. “I have to take Mandy to a job interview, and Dee was supposed to watch him but she’s a goddamn bitch and got shitfaced last night and woke up somewhere across town. You don’t even have to do anything, he’ll probably still be asleep by the time we get back.”

Mac groaned and cracked one eye open. “Wh’time is it?” he asked. He couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few hours.

“Eight in the morning,” Dennis said, holding out two Excedrin. Mac took them and swallowed them dry. “Just make sure the place doesn’t burn down, that’s all I’m asking, okay? Have my back on this one.”

Mac sighed long-sufferingly. “Whatever, you can leave him here, but I’m going back to sleep,” he mumbled. Dennis clapped him on the shoulder gratefully. “Dee’s a whore.”

“Absolutely,” Dennis agreed. “Thanks, man.”

He didn’t know how much time passed before he opened his eyes again, but his headache was gone, and there was actually sun coming in through the curtains. He stood up, stretched, and nearly jumped out of his skin when he locked eyes with a tiny person sitting at his kitchen table.

“Jesus,” he hissed, placing a hand on his heart. He vaguely remembered agreeing to this, but he didn’t appreciate Dennis taking advantage of his half-conscious state very much. He scratched the back of his neck. “Um, hi.”

The kid didn’t say anything, just continued to stare at him with his wide, creepy eyes. God, how many years did it take for people to develop basic human social skills? Didn’t he realize how uncomfortable this situation was? Read the room, kid. “Okay, good talk. I’m taking a shower,” Mac said, heading toward his en suite bathroom. “Let me know if you start choking or bleeding I guess.”

“I’m hungry,” the kid finally spoke up, his tiny baby voice slow and quiet like every syllable took effort, kind of like how Charlie spoke sometimes. Mac paused with his hand on his doorknob.

He didn’t know what they could possibly have that was appropriate for a kid to eat. Ever since Mac had begun his journey to becoming super hot and jacked, he usually just had protein shakes for breakfast, and he was lucky if Dennis ate a handful of cherries when they got to the bar. There probably wasn’t a single carb in the entire apartment. “Can’t you wait until your mom gets back to feed you?” he asked tiredly. The kid didn’t respond, but he looked at him with a sad, wide-eyed expression, and Mac groaned and headed toward the fridge. He must get his manipulation tactics from his dad. “Fine. What do you want?”

“French toast,” the kid piped up immediately, but in his tiny baby voice, so it sounded more like _Fwench_. Mac might have thought it was cute if he didn’t want to drop kick this kid all the way back to North Dakota.

“Do I look like someone who knows how to make French toast?” he asked dryly. The kid blinked at him.

“I know how. Mommy and I make it together,” he said, as if Mac gave a motherfuck. “We made it for Daddy at home.”

Mac rolled his eyes. _Home_ meaning North Dakota, he assumed. “Well, I’m not your— wait. You got Dennis to eat _French toast_?” he asked in disbelief. The kid nodded. “Huh.” He pulled out his phone, Googling _how to make French toast_ out of curiosity.

“Well,” he said, scrolling through the ingredient list. “I’m seeing a problem right off the bat. We don’t have any bread.” Or butter, or syrup. In fact, he was pretty sure the only ingredient on the entire list they actually had was eggs.

The kid frowned. “Do you have cimmanin?'' he asked. Mac scoffed.

“Yeah, totally, right over there in the spice cabinet,” he said. The kid just kept staring at him blankly. He clearly didn’t understand the subtle nuances of sarcasm. “Look, you’re sitting in what we call a _bachelor pad_. Two single dudes living together don’t usually own things like _cinnamon_.”

The kid tilted his head, kind of like Poppins used to when Mac would ramble to him about his day after school. He was always much more better at listening than his parents. Mac really missed that dog, sometimes. “Oh,” the kid said.

“That settles it, then,” Mac said, standing up. “We gotta go to the Wawa. C’mon, kid, pop your shoes on.”

The kid stood up, but he shifted awkwardly, looking down at himself and pulling at his Spider-man pants. “I’m wearing my jammies,” he mumbled. Mac glanced down at himself, realizing for the first time that he was still wearing the clothes he’d had on all day yesterday, the button popped on his Dickies and a fair amount of drink stains down the front of his _Beast Coast_ shirt. He shrugged.

“Doesn’t matter. It’s like, totally acceptable to wear pajamas to the store at the crack of dawn,” he said, glancing at the clock. 10:43am. “No more talking, come on, pick up the pace. Do you want French toast or not?”

The Wawa wasn’t unreasonably far from their apartment, and Mac tended to avoid paying for Ubers unless absolutely necessary, so he and the kid began their walk through the backroads of Philadelphia. What he didn’t account for, however, was clumsy little baby legs being incapable of keeping up with his long, manly stride. What was supposed to be a twenty minute walk ended up being more like forty-five. “I’m tired, Mr. Mac,” the kid pouted when they finally reached the store front.

“Yeah, I’m tired too, from having to stop and wait every five steps for you to catch up,” Mac replied with an eye roll, heaving the kid up from under his shoulders and plopping him into a cart. “We gotta get you doing some lunges or something, seriously.”

He let the kid pick the ingredients off the shelf as he carted him around, getting a tiny bit of satisfaction from watching how excited something as simple as grocery shopping seemed to make him. “We need… four,” the kid said thoughtfully, hauling four bottles of syrup off the shelf. Mac shrugged.

“Sure, you’re the chef,” he said. “Oh, hey, we should make screwdrivers too! Those go good with breakfast.”

The kid blinked at him. “Screwdrivers?” he asked, but in his tiny baby voice it sounded more like _scwewdwivers_. Mac nodded, steering them into the liquor section.

“Yeah, Dennis loves that girly shit. Grab that bottle, the one that says _Tito’s_. No, not that, the one next to it. There you go,” he instructed. He locked eyes with some chick who was staring at him judgmentally, and he glowered right back. “The hell are you looking at?” She rolled her eyes and walked away.

When they were finished, it occurred to Mac that if the walk _there_ was torture, the addition of the heavy grocery bags was gonna make the walk back even worse. He sighed and pulled up the Uber app in defeat. “You owe me fifteen bucks, dude,” he muttered.

Just as he finished ordering the ride, a text message notification popped up from Dennis. _Taking way longer than I thought it would. Everything fine on your end?_ Mac snorted. Normally _he_ would be the one sending messages like that; at least, he used to be, before Dennis had spent a whole year half a country away without checking in once. It was clear that Dennis wasn’t asking because he was concerned about _Mac_. “Hey, kid, do me a favor and lay down face first on the concrete,” he said, pulling up his camera. “Try to look as dead as possible. Yep, right there, that’s perfect.”

He sent the picture without any caption, before pocketing his phone. Dennis could sweat over that for a while.

“Mr. Mac,” the kid mumbled as Mac strapped him into the back seat of the shitty Hummer that came to pick them up. “I need a booster seat.”

Mac snorted. “What, are you kidding? My parents stopped putting me in a booster seat when I was two years old,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

The driver glanced at the rear view mirror as Mac climbed into the passenger seat. “Cute kid,” he said. Mac looked back at him, too.

“You think?” he said with a shrug. “He’s fine, I guess. Not gonna be a Gerber baby or anything. Oh, like one time, my friends and I found a dumpster baby, and _that_ kid was cute. We couldn’t make any money off of him because he was white, though. So I think we just got rid of him or something. I don’t really remember.” 

The driver opened his mouth like he was gonna respond, but then closed it firmly. They spent the rest of the ride in silence.

Dennis still wasn’t home when they made it back to the apartment, which Mac was banking on, because if he knew Mac was making such a calorie-loaded meal with the intention of convincing him to eat it he would probably start screaming at him. It was better to spring it on him by surprise. Mac was getting really good at using mind games to trick Dennis into eating. “Okay, let’s see. It says we gotta coat the bread in the eggs,” he said, squinting at his phone screen. “That sounds… fucking gross. Is that really how people make French toast? It’s just egg bread?”

The kid nodded excitedly. “I like to dip the bread,” he said. Mac shrugged, pushing the bowl of beaten eggs toward him.

“Okay, cool, you do that and I’ll make the screwdrivers,” he said, clapping his hands together. The kid rolled up his sleeves and got to work.

The end result was… decent. They burned the first three pieces to shit, and put way too much cinnamon on the next five, but by the end of it they had a stack of French toast that seemed mostly edible. They each took two pieces for themselves, and Mac watched in amusement as the kid doused his in so much syrup that it nearly overflowed from his plate. “Your mom doesn’t let you eat a lot of sugar, huh,” he guessed. The kid just looked up at him with bright eyes.

Dennis and Mandy were home within the half hour. Mac was three screwdrivers in, not because he liked sissy girly drinks like Dennis, but because he wasn’t _not_ gonna drink an alcoholic beverage if there was a pitcher of it in front of him. He stood up quickly. “Hey,” he said, raising his glass in cheers. Dennis raised an eyebrow.

“What’s this?” he asked flatly, taking in the state of the kitchen. There was about a loaf and a half’s worth of French toast still sitting in the middle of the table.

Mac grinned proudly. “I made breakfast,” he said. “You guys hungry?”

Dennis eyed the food sourly. “It’s noon,” he said, as if that was an answer to Mac’s question. “And since when do you cook?”

“Just eat some,” Mac said, pulling out a chair. Dennis hesitated.

“No, that’s alright. I’ll eat later,” he said.

The kid jumped up from his seat at the table, suddenly, walking over to tug at Dennis’s shirt. “Daddy, we made it for you, just like at home,” he said happily in his teeny tiny baby voice. “We did really good.”

Dennis stared at him for several moments, before reaching down to pat his blonde little head. “Okay, okay. Let’s see what you got, buddy,” he said, sitting down at the table and letting the kid make him a plate.

Mac watched bitterly as Dennis ate, like it was the most normal thing in the world, like getting him to do something as simple as eating breakfast wasn’t one of the biggest challenges in Mac’s life. It occurred to him that it was never about the French toast at all. Dennis was doing it for the kid, doing something he would never do for Mac no matter how hard he tried.

But Dennis was eating. As irritated and petty and jealous as Mac felt, his relief outweighed all of that as he watched Dennis reach for another slice.

“Thanks for today,” Dennis said, with genuine gratitude that was very rare for him. He and Mac had moved to the couch while Mandy got the kid dressed for the day, passing the pitcher of screwdriver back and forth. “There’s just so much shit to do, you know? We gotta find Mandy a job, and look for an affordable apartment, and once we deal with that I should start looking for a new job, too—”

“Woah, woah, what?” Mac interrupted. “Why? What about the bar?” Dennis sighed, leaning his head back against the couch.

“Kids are expensive, man,” he said. “He’s only been here a few days and my bank account is already drained. Did you know that you have to pay all kinds of fees just to enroll a kid in _public school_? It’s bullshit. The bar isn’t gonna cut it, dude, not anymore.”

Mac frowned deeply, throwing back the rest of the pitcher. He tapped his fingers against the glass contemplatively. “Everything’s gonna be so different,” he mumbled childishly. Dennis sighed.

“It was already different,” he pointed out. And Mac knew that was true. Maybe no one else in the gang had noticed, but the Dennis who came back from North Dakota hadn’t been the same one who had left. “But now… now I think it can be good different, you know?”

Mac glanced back at the closed door of Dennis’s room. “You really like that kid, huh?” he asked. Dennis laughed once, rolling his eyes.

“Yeah, he’s pretty cool,” he said.

The way Mac saw it, there were two ways he could go about this: the Old Mac way or the New Mac way. Old Mac would certainly stuff all of this new information deep down, pretend he’d never seen it at all, and keep going about his business without acknowledging the obvious truth in front of him. He would keep telling himself this was all in vain, that there was no way Dennis _actually_ cared that much about the kid, and that it was all just a doomed-for-failure scheme in an attempt to give his life meaning. He would convince himself that Dennis would come to his senses and that, eventually, he would realize that Mac was enough to make him happy. That Mac was all he would ever need.

But here was the thing about Old Mac: as happy as he _thought_ he was in his blissful ignorance, he would always have that raging bitch known as _the truth_ building inside of him like a storm. And New Mac knew, in reality, he would feel much, _much_ better the moment he actually acknowledged what he’d been trying so hard to ignore.

New Mac would stop hiding from that truth, he would let the storm loose and go out and dance in it. And he would suffer, probably, and get hurt a lot, but he would be able to breathe and move on and be the New Mac he was always meant to be. And it would be okay.

“Dennis is gonna leave,” he said, lying across the pool table with a beer in one hand and a pleasant buzz in his brain. “He’s gonna leave and be with his family, and that’s okay, because he likes his kid. I don’t even blame him, really, the kid’s nowhere near as annoying and awful as I thought he’d be. And… and he can get him to eat and stuff, and he can fill the hole. I can't fill the hole. And that’s, it’s fine. Shit, I need a new roommate. I can't afford rent. I don’t even pay rent.”

Charlie barely glanced at him from where he was playing darts against himself. “Hey,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard Mac at all. “Why do you think Dennis came back from North Dakota?”

Mac squinted against the fluorescent light dangling above him. “Dunno,” he said. “I never asked.”

“Me either,” Charlie said. “But why do you think?”

Mac thought about it. He’d convinced himself it was because Dennis hadn’t vibed with his kid, but he obviously knew now that that wasn’t the case. Old Mac would probably say it was because Dennis missed the gang. Missed him. But unfortunately, New Mac had this thing called _self-awareness_ , which made him understand sad realities like the fact that someone who had left them for twelve months without even leaving behind a number to contact him probably didn’t actually give a shit about them at all.

“He was probably just going crazy up there,” Mac said, his eyes fluttering shut. “If the suburbs of Philly drove him batshit, I can only imagine how he handled the boonies.”

Dennis and Mandy were both busy with their various domestic tasks again the next day, and Dee must have managed to shockingly avoid being a useless whore for once, because they didn’t ask Mac to watch the kid this time. It wasn’t like Mac would’ve really minded if they had, though. The kid wasn’t as much of an annoying handful as he’d expected, and without Dennis around, it wasn’t like he hated the company.

His kid-free day was cut short, however, when he walked into Paddy’s later that afternoon to see that Dee had the kid propped up on the bar and drinking soda straight from the tap. He paused in the entryway for several moments, slowly processing the scene. “Oh, good, Mac, c’mere,” Dee said, waving him over. “We need a mediator. Charlie says Brian doesn’t look like me, but he totally does, right? Look, look in his eyes. Those are totally my eyes.”

“You seriously brought him to the bar?” Mac asked exasperatedly, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “God, you really have no motherly instincts at all, do you?”

Dee shrugged him off. “What, I was supposed to just sit around with him in my apartment all day? That sounds boring as shit,” she said. “Besides, he’s having a great time, right Brian?”

The kid nodded enthusiastically, holding up the soda hose. “Auntie Dee gave me soda,” he said happily. Mac sighed.

“He likes sugar,” he pointed out. “Also, fortunately for him, he looks nothing like you.”

Dee gasped, affronted. “Are you kidding? Look, he has my blonde hair!” she argued.

“Oh, please, Dee. You’re a bottle blonde and everyone knows it.”

“That’s what I said!” Charlie piped up from his table on the other side of the bar.

“I am _not_! This is natural!”

“You’re all fulla shit, that kid looks like _me_ ,” Frank pointed out casually. “See that nose? That’s a strong Reynolds nose right there.”

Mac gaped at him. “Frank, you have no blood relation to this child!” he said. “And wishing for a kid to look like you is cruel even by your standards.”

“His last name isn’t even Reynolds. He literally has more relation to the dude who got murdered by a crackhead behind our bar than he does to you,” Dee pointed out. Frank just shrugged, unbothered.

“Yeah, now that you mention it, they really gotta get this kid’s name changed,” Charlie said. He got up and moved behind the bar, standing in front of where the kid was perched and swinging his legs happily. “What do you want your name to be, champ? I’ll put in a good word with your dad.”

The kid seemed to think on it for a second, his eyes going glassy in concentration. “Hulk Smash,” he finally answered, casually, like it was the most obvious answer in the world. Charlie grinned.

“Awesome,” he said, holding his fist up for a fist bump. The kid touched his knuckles enthusiastically.

The kid was asleep in the office by the time Dennis came in at around 8pm, finally having crashed from his soda-induced sugar high that lasted most of the afternoon. “Heyyyy Dennis!” Mac said loudly as Dennis approached the bar. Dennis ignored him. 

“Where’s my kid?” he asked Dee. She nodded her head toward the office.

“Passed out in the back,” she said casually. “He’s still in one piece, don’t worry. I’m totally the best aunt ever.”

Dennis hummed in acknowledgment. He was clearly unbothered by the fact that his sister had brought his baby child to a shitty dive bar for the day, and that thought comforted Mac, a little. At least fatherhood hadn’t made Dennis _too_ responsible and boring. “Have a beer,” Mac said, cracking one open and setting it down in front of him. Dennis sat down and took it, looking almost relieved.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said. “Running around Philly is exhausting, I need a break. Not to mention real estate brokers are like, the _worst_ people in the entire world to deal with.”

Mac grinned crookedly. “Should we bust out Hugh Honey and Vic Vinegar again?” he asked. Dennis rolled his eyes.

“Dunno if pretending to be a gay real estate agent couple is gonna help with _getting_ a place, buddy,” he pointed out, but there was a ghost of a smile on his face.

Mac tapped his beer against his chin thoughtfully. “No, man, I think it could work,” he said. “Like, we could bring in competition. Pretend we’re offering Mandy a phenomenal price on a place, and then the other dude is gonna knock down his price too because he won’t wanna lose the sale. Boom, apartment secured.”

Dennis seemed to think on it for a moment. “You know what?” he said. “You might be onto something. Real estate is a highly competitive market. And it’s all commission-based, so if you don’t make a sale, you don’t get paid.”

“Right?” Mac said excitedly. “So the other guy would totally take the bait.”

“Hold on, but if you’re doing the whole good-cop-bad-cop thing again, you should definitely switch roles,” Dee pointed out. “Mac might’ve been the aggressive one before, but now he’s definitely the nice one. And Dennis, as we all know, is the most hostile and terrifying person to ever walk the planet earth.”

“God, Dee, shut _up_. Do you ever shut up? We’re talking here,” Dennis snapped, clearly unaware of the irony. “Go bother Charlie or something.”

Mac chuckled, handing Dennis another beer as he polished off his first. For the first time in a long time, it almost felt like things were the same as they’d always been.

He didn’t know how much time had passed, but at some point they’d migrated to one of the booths in the back, and he was well past the point of being tipsy. Dennis seemed to be in a similar state. “I interviewed for a job today. Data entry kinda thing. Boring as shit,” Dennis complained, leaning back into the booth and sighing dramatically. “The chick who interviewed me had pretty big tits, though. Maybe if I sleep with her I’ll be able to get away with not working hard.” Mac snorted into his drink.

“Can’t do that anymore, man,” he pointed out. “You’re all tied down now and shit.” Dennis raised an eyebrow at him.

“What? You mean Mandy?” he asked, snorting. “Mandy and I aren’t together, Mac.”

Mac shrugged. “That’s what you think now,” he said. “But you’re gonna be living with her, and you guys have a _kid_. Only gonna be a matter of time before she wants a ring.”

Dennis raised an eyebrow. “I’m not moving in with her,” he said. “I’m just helping her find a place in Philly, and we’re gonna do the whole visitation thing.”

Mac blinked in surprise. “Oh,” he said. “So you’re not moving out?”

“No?” Dennis said. Mac huffed.

“You could’ve told me that,” he said. Dennis scoffed in disbelief.

“Wha— you never asked! You haven’t shown any interest in this entire situation,” he snapped. “Am I supposed to be responsible for the assumptions you make?”

Mac rolled his eyes. “Okay, fine, but maybe you could’ve been like, a _little_ more forthcoming with your information, bro,” he said. “You just like, sprung on me that your kid was coming, and didn’t say anything else. Last time that happened you got up and left without consulting me at _all,_ so excuse me for assuming the worst.”

Dennis paused, looking down at his drink and avoiding Mac’s eyes uncomfortably. “Whatever, man, I just… ugh,” he said. “I hate this. I hate talking about things, you know?”

Mac sighed. “Yeah,” he said, because he did. “Sometimes I hate hearing about things.”

They were quiet for several beats, the crease between Dennis’s eyebrows doing that weird thing it did when he started thinking too much. “I don’t want to move out, okay? I want to keep living with you,” he admitted, though it seemed to have taken a lot of effort for him to do so. He glanced up at Mac hesitantly. “Do you want that too?”

Mac didn’t hesitate. “Yeah, man,” he replied. “Of course.”

They were interrupted, suddenly, by Charlie yelling from across the bar, causing them to both jump in their seats. “Yo, Dennis, can you come get your phone?” he called. “It’s been buzzing and shit for like an hour and a half.” Dennis’s eyes widened.

“What time is it?” he asked in alarm. Mac checked his phone.

“Uhh, eleven-thirty,” he said. Dennis groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Shit, Mandy’s probably freaking out,” he said. “I was supposed to bring Brian home like four hours ago.”

Mac rolled his eyes. “The kid’s _fine_ , the back office is like, a super comfortable place to sleep,” he said. “Probably more comfortable than your weird vibrating bondage bed.”

“Whatever, can you go get him, please?” Dennis said, pulling his phone off the charger behind the bar and pressing it to his ear. “And for the record, I got rid of all the fetish shit before they got here. Oh, hey, Mandy.”

Mac sighed loudly, hauling himself out of the booth and making his way to the office. “Up and at ‘em, kid, we gotta go,” he said, clapping his hands together as he entered. The kid was curled up on the chair, several jackets thrown on top of him as a makeshift blanket. He was out cold. “Hey, seriously, wake up. I’m not gonna carry you.”

A few minutes later and Mac was walking back out to the bar disgruntledly, the kid clinging to the front of him like a koala. “Alright, so, Mandy’s mad,” Dennis said. “Like really mad, so let’s hurry. Dee, are my keys under the bar?”

Dee gaped at him. “Um, you’re not _driving_ ,” she said in disbelief. “You’ve had like eight beers.”

Dennis and Mac exchanged a perplexed look. “So?” he asked.

“ _So_ ,” she snapped. “Maybe you shouldn’t be drunk driving with a baby in the car. Jackass.”

Mac watched the realization dawn on Dennis’s face at the same time it spread to his own brain. It was kind of scary, how accustomed they were to acting this way, to doing dumb destructive shit without thinking of the consequences. It had always been like that, for all of them. They never looked further than their own self-interest, and at times, they didn’t even look _that_ far. But it couldn’t be that way anymore. They had a whole other tiny human whose well-being they needed to consider and put above themselves, because he was way too small and stupid to do anything on his own. A grown-up could decide themselves whether they wanted to get into a car with a decidedly drunk driver or not. Brian Jr. couldn’t.

By _they_ , of course, he meant Dennis. Because this wasn’t Mac’s problem or responsibility. He wrapped his arms a little tighter around the kid instinctively, anyway.

One Uber ride later, and Mac was able to witness firsthand that Mandy was, in fact, mad. He hadn’t really believed that she _could_ get that mad. Mac didn’t know her that well, but he _did_ know that she had the angelic levels of forgiveness required to allow the man who tried to fake his death to get away from her back into her kid’s life, twice, so he figured it was safe to assume she didn’t offend very easily. Even she had her limits, though, apparently.

“He is _five years old_ , Dennis,” Mac heard her say from behind his closed bedroom door, her voice calm and terrifying. It would’ve been less scary if she’d been yelling. “I know you’re new to all this, and I’m trying to be patient, but you cannot let a _five year old_ hang out in a _bar_ all day. Not to mention I didn’t even know where my son was for _four hours_ because you were too busy getting drunk with your friends to answer my calls. Do you have any idea how worried I was? I thought something terrible could’ve happened to the two of you, like you got in an accident while driving home, or—”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Dennis said tiredly. “I know, I messed up, but I’m just— I’m tired, okay, can we talk about this tomorrow?”

Mandy was quiet for a long time. Mac held his breath. “I’ve given you a lot of chances, Dennis,” she said quietly. “I know you did the best you could in North Dakota, and that’s why I’m here now, because I really want to find a way to make this work. But you have to meet me halfway. You can’t have it all, buddy, you can’t be a father _and_ have everything stay the same as it’s always been. I’ve made changes for you, so now it’s your turn. Got it?”

They stopped talking after that. Mac let out a long, slow exhale.

He waited until he heard the door to Dennis’s room shut, signaling Mandy’s exit, before getting out of bed and opening his own door. Dennis was sprawled on the couch with an arm thrown over his face. “Hey,” Mac said. “I have a confession to make. You know how you asked me if you had noticeable crow’s feet the other day, and I said no? Well that was a lie. They’re totally noticeable.”

Dennis slowly dragged his arm away, meeting Mac’s eyes. “What?” he asked sharply. Mac shrugged.

“You’re getting old, dude,” he said simply. “You’re gonna mess up your back permanently if you keep sleeping out here until they find a place. Go sleep in my bed, I’ll take the couch.”

Dennis sat up quickly, gaping at him in disbelief. “Wha— are you kidding? If I’m old, that makes you, what, young and spritely? You’re barely younger than me!” he hissed. “You’re not _less likely_ to get back problems than I am.”

“Well, that’s not really true, since I’m super fit and work out a ton,” Mac pointed out. “My core is way stronger than yours.” Dennis rolled his eyes.

“Go to hell,” he muttered, standing up. “I’ll sleep in the bed, but only if you do too. I’m not gonna let you pretend you’re some manly saint sacrificing yourself for my weak fragile body.”

Mac hid his grin as Dennis brushed past him. “Whatever you say, Den,” he said with a yawn.

He was almost asleep, Dennis’s back pressed warm and firm against his, when the other man’s voice jerked him out of his semi-conscious state. “You were kidding about the crow’s feet, right?” Dennis mumbled. “You were just saying that to fuck with me?”

Mac smiled, closing his eyes and feeling himself relax completely. Dennis would always be Dennis. “Sure, man,” he mumbled, giving up the fight against sleep as it dragged him under the surface. “You’re very handsome.”

When Mac woke up the next morning, vaguely hungover and with a warm body pressed up against his side, his immediate assumption was that he’d gotten laid. It had been awhile, not because there was any lack of guys who wanted to sleep with him now that he was all hot and jacked, mind you, but because he himself had been weirdly picky when it came to hooking up lately. He wasn’t even really sure why; when Dennis had been gone for that year, Mac had had a new dude in his bed almost every night. 

Except, if he was being honest with himself, in true New Mac fashion, he knew it was because he was scared. Scared of drawing attention to his gayness, scared of even the smallest possibility that it was a contributor toward why his and Dennis’s relationship had been so strained for so long now. He remembered the conversation he’d had with Charlie on Valentine’s Day, the one right before that kid came along and Dennis left for what they’d thought was a forever. _He’s acting like, so weird, especially toward me. I think it’s because I’m gay, and he’s like, totally uncomfortable with it._

_Well, no, because he’s known that forever, so it’s… y’know, it’s something else._

Mac remembered a lot of things about that day.

He finally turned enough to catch a glimpse of his conquest, only to be reminded that it was just Dennis, meaning the chances that he’d gotten laid were pretty much zero. It was a little surprising that he’d managed to get Dennis into bed with him even platonically, though. It hadn’t always been that way; they used to share beds all the time, especially when Dennis was in college and they had to cram themselves onto his twin dorm bed when Mac visited, not to mention all those months they lived with Dee. But lately Dennis had been super resistant to Mac touching him or being close to him whatsoever. _I don’t want you touching me, at all, okay? It’s never gonna happen. Not willingly._

Yeah, yeah.

His shifting must have woken Dennis, because he suddenly stirred beside him, his brow wrinkling. “S’cold as shit in here,” he mumbled without opening his eyes. “Would it kill you to put sheets on your bed?”

“Too much work. And it’s hot as hell, dude, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mac replied. “Have you been taking your supplements?”

Dennis shrugged, which was a no. He’d pretty much chalked his anemia diagnosis up as bullshit, the same way he had with his borderline personality disorder diagnosis. Mac had never met someone so stubborn in his entire life. “What time is it?” Dennis asked, ignoring the question completely. Mac squinted at his phone.

“Nine-thirty,” he read. Dennis groaned.

“Gotta drop Brian off at Dee’s before we meet with that jackass broker again,” he mumbled. “I should get up.” 

Mac paused for a moment, before sighing long-sufferingly. “Nah, don’t… don’t bother taking him to Dee’s, man,” he said. “There’s no point when you can just leave him here.”

Dennis cracked an eye open for the first time, shooting Mac a contemplative look. He smirked. “You like him, huh?” he said haughtily, like he’d caught Mac in an embarrassing confession. Mac rolled his eyes.

“ _Thank you, Mac, for being the best nicest roommate ever and offering to watch my bastard love child for me for free,_ ” Mac said in his best Dennis impression. “I think that’s what you meant to say.”

Dennis snorted, rolling over onto his stomach. “Okay, cool, that gives me an extra hour or so,” he said. “I’m going back to sleep.”

Mac was quiet for a few beats, tapping his fingers against his stomach as he listened to Dennis’s even breathing. “Hey Den?” he spoke up after several minutes. Dennis grunted in reply. “Why’d you come back from North Dakota?”

Dennis didn’t answer for a long time. He slowly shifted so that his face was no longer buried in the pillow, fixing Mac with an unamused look. “Are you— you’re kidding me, right?” he asked flatly. “ _Now_ you want to know? I’ve been home for over a year and it just now occurred to you to be curious?”

Mac shrugged. “Nah, I’ve always been curious,” he said simply. “I just thought if I pretended not to care it’d make you feel like shit.”

“Awesome, Mac. Thanks.”

“I was really mad at you for leaving.”

“I— yeah.” Dennis sighed, rolling into his back again and pushing the palms of his hands against his eyes. “Mandy kicked me out.”

Mac blinked. That was not the answer he’d been expecting. “What? Why?” he asked. “Did you fuck up with the kid or something?” Dennis rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, Mac, I was such a horrible dad that she moved my kid out to Philly to be with me,” he said dryly. “It… it had nothing to do with him. It was all just a huge overreaction, honestly, you know how women are. She was all obsessed with me going to therapy and taking the meds that quack doctor prescribed me, because I _wasn’t handling the lifestyle change very well,_ or whatever. But trust me, anyone would go crazy out in the fucking sticks of North Dakota, it had nothing to do with any of that mental health bullshit.”

Mac blinked slowly, giving the information a moment to process. “So she made you come back to Philly because she thought you were gonna have a breakdown or something?” he said with a scoff. “That is so stupid, dude, she just doesn’t get you. Sure you get kinda weird in your head sometimes, but it’s not even a big deal. You always bounce back.”

“Right, exactly!” Dennis said, his face splitting into a relieved grin. “That’s what I told her! Like I said, overreaction.”

“It would’ve been fine if I was there, I bet,” Mac pointed out. “Because I get you.”

Dennis’s smile slowly faded. “Yeah, totally,” he said, his voice much weaker than it had been a moment ago. He took a long pause. “Okay, there’s— there was another thing. But you have to promise you’re not gonna freak out and get all annoying if I tell you.”

Mac raised an eyebrow. “Okay?” he said, feeling the mood in the room change drastically. Dennis closed his eyes.

“I was kind of drinking a lot, when I was there. Like, a lot even for me,” he said. He exhaled slowly. “There was this one night, I was— dude, I was _blasted_. Like you remember that time we ran down Charlie Dee and Frank with the Rover on our way to the strip club? Even worse than that.”

Mac whistled lowly. “That’s pretty drunk, dude,” he said, trying to think of the last time he himself had gotten that bad. He was drunk a good amount of the time, but he hadn’t been _fall asleep driving_ drunk since he was in his twenties, probably. They were getting too old to do shit like that recreationally. Something told Mac recreation hadn’t been Dennis’s goal.

“Yeah, right? Well, anyway, I drove back home from the bar and— I don’t actually remember any of this, by the way, this is just from what Mandy told me,” he clarified, his voice a bit rushed and nervous. He was pointedly not meeting Mac’s eyes. “Anyway, when I got back I pulled into the garage, and, well… I closed the door and I— I fell asleep. I just passed out. Before I had a chance to turn the car off, I guess.”

It was amazing, really, how quickly Mac could go from sleepily attentive to feeling like all of the air had been forced from his chest. Like he was back on the church cruise ship, six feet underwater and waiting for his lungs to start flooding. He stared at Dennis with wide eyes. “What are you saying, Dennis?” he asked, deadly serious. Dennis waved him off.

“Stop— stop freaking out. I told you not to freak out. It was an _accident_ , Mac, I swear on your stupid God,” he said irritably. Mac wasn’t exactly reassured. Dennis was a good liar, the best he had ever met, because a lot of the time he managed to convince even himself that the lies he was telling were true. “But I had to go to the hospital, and Mandy lost her shit, and that’s when she told me I had to come back to Philly. End of story. Are you happy now?”

Mac frowned. No, he wasn’t happy, obviously, but there was only so much he could do about it now. As much as he wanted to be mad at Dennis for not telling him sooner, he knew that he would have, if Mac had _asked_ sooner. And he’d wanted Mac to ask. This whole time, he’d practically been _begging_ him to ask, but Mac had been too busy being a petty piece of shit.

“I have one more question,” Mac said, speaking through the lump in his throat and trying to clear his mind of horrifying thoughts and what-ifs. Dennis finally turned to face him, albeit hesitantly. Mac met his eyes. “Why did you go, man?”

Dennis looked like he was going to respond, for a moment. Then he sat up. “No more questions,” he said, stretching until his back popped. “I’m using your shower.”

Mac made an attempt to go back to sleep, but he spent the next few hours tossing and turning and thinking way too much. It wasn’t until he heard a tiny baby hand tapping on his door at around noon that he decided to accept defeat. “What?” he muttered, sitting up on the edge of his bed. The door creaked open slowly.

“I’m hungry,” the kid muttered. Mac sighed.

They ended up back at the Wawa, piling way more ingredients into their cart than were probably necessary to make grilled cheese. “Huh. Paula Deen suggests adding green onions and dijon mustard,” Mac said thoughtfully as he scrolled through the ingredient list on his phone. “What do you think?” The kid wrinkled his nose.

“No mustard,” he said. Mac nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, that sounds gross,” he said. A thought occurred to him, suddenly. “Hey, you know what, let’s buy stuff for dinner too. What else did your dad like to eat back in the sticks?”

The kid took a moment to think. “Daddy likes… cake,” he said with a grin. “And cookies!”

Mac hummed thoughtfully. “Well, I think that’s definitely not true, but I am liking the attempt at manipulation. Work on it a little,” he said. “How about spaghetti? Think we can get him to eat some spaghetti?” Brian shrugged, notably less enthusiastic.

Honestly, Mac was taking a liking to this whole cooking thing. Back in the suburbs, he’d just seen it as boring, annoying housewife shit, probably because at the time he had been bored and annoyed and practically a housewife. But now that he wasn’t being forced to sustain himself and Dennis in a lonely hellhole, it was actually kind of fun. Maybe because he was actually following real recipes instead of just making boxed macaroni, or maybe because he saw getting Dennis to actually eat a healthy amount of food as an exciting challenge. 

Or maybe it was because of the kid. Mac was really beginning to understand what Dennis saw in him.

“Mr. Mac?” the kid asked, chowing down on his third grilled cheese as Mac poured spaghetti noodles into a strainer. “Are you my other dad?”

Mac fumbled, missing the strainer and consequently pouring boiling hot water all over his hand. He said a word he definitely should not have said in front of a five-year-old very, very loudly. “Uhm,” he said, after he’d shoved his hand into the freezer and recovered to some extent. “No, Dennis is your dad. You can’t have more than one dad.”

Except that wasn’t really true. Dennis and Dee had two dads, and, he supposed, when he got married and adopted someday, that kid would have two dads too. He didn’t really feel the need to explain all that, though. Brian had one dad and would only ever have one.

“But you live together with Daddy,” the kid continued, confused. Mac sighed.

“Look, kid, I know you’re from the boonies, but most people aren’t financially capable of living alone in the big city,” he said, as though he provided any financial contribution to their apartment whatsoever. The kid didn’t need to know that. “I’m just your dad’s roommate, okay? We’re not family, at all.”

Mac tried not to think about that brief moment, the first time Mandy had come to Philly, when he’d thought maybe he _could_ be another dad to this kid. _We? We are not a couple, Mac!_

Old Mac would have those moments of weakness, sometimes, where he allowed himself to fantasize about getting his happy ending with Dennis. Not anymore, though. He was way more smarter now.

Dennis and Mandy didn’t return home until late in the afternoon, and by that time, he and the kid had the kitchen table set up for dinner. “Okay, remember, kid, you gotta sell it,” Mac said under his breath. “Be all cute and shit. Like, _look, Daddy, I made this extra special for you!_ Or something.” The kid nodded in assent.

“Hey, fellas! Sorry we were gone so long,” Mandy said as they entered the kitchen. “Finding a decent place to live in the big city is harder than ya’d think.”

Dennis immediately noticed the table setting, narrowing his eyes at Mac. “You made _dinner_?” he asked in disbelief.

“And it isn’t even mac and cheese,” Mac said enthusiastically. “Come on and eat, I’m sure you guys are hungry.” Dennis glared at him, as if he could see right through his intentions. He probably could. Dennis was like that, he knew Mac better than he knew himself.

“No, pasta is— it has so many carbs,” Dennis said irritably. “And I already had a lot today, so I’m just, I’ll just have an apple for dinner. You guys go ahead and eat.”

Mandy raised an eyebrow at him. “Dennis, I was with you all day, all you had was a cup of coffee,” she pointed out, much to Mac’s delight. It was nice to have someone to back him up at times like these, when Dennis was completely unreasonable.

“Yeah, but it— it had cream and sugar,” Dennis pointed out weakly.

Brian bounced up to Dennis, right on cue, and Mac could tell victory was in their grasp. “Daddy, try my sketty, please?” he said, pouting slightly. Oh, this kid was good. “Me and Mr. Mac worked _really_ hard on it for you.”

Dennis hesitated for a long moment, before sitting down at the table with a sigh. Mac grinned, holding his hand behind his back for the kid to high-five.

That night, after the kid had been put to bed, the three of them crammed onto the couch to watch a movie. Mac had suggested Commando, but Mandy wanted to watch some chick flick about cowboys or something, so they settled somewhere in the middle with Kindergarten Cop. “Junior seems to have really taken a liking to ya, Mac,” Mandy pointed out as Mac impatiently waited for a shirtless Schwarzenegger scene. “He’s usually really shy with other grown-ups, but it seems like you two clicked right away.”

“Uh-huh,” Mac muttered over a mouthful of popcorn.

“Y’know,” she continued. “I didn’t want to bring this up in front of Junior, and if you don’t want to, we’ll completely understand. But it looks like Dennis and I are gonna be working during the day pretty soon here, and we’re gonna need someone to watch him when we’re not home.”

Dennis and Mac both looked at her in surprise. “Uh, Mandy, I thought we talked about putting him in daycare,” Dennis said uncomfortably. She waved him off.

“I know, I know,” she said. “But he really likes Mac! And daycare is expensive, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to explore our other options first. It would just be until he starts school at the end of August.”

Dennis glanced at Mac. “Seriously, man, you don’t have to,” he said.

Mac considered it. His other options were staying at home alone all day without Dennis, or going to Paddy’s and having to deal with the other three without Dennis, neither of which seemed very appealing. And honestly, he would benefit from them not having to pay for childcare, too, considering he and Dennis shared a bank account. He shrugged. “Sure,” he said, tossing another handful of popcorn in his mouth. “I’m down.”

“Great!” Mandy said excitedly. Dennis just gave him a long, thoughtful look.

True to Mandy’s word, she and Dennis eventually got full-time jobs, meaning Mac, bizarrely, became something of a full-time nanny. Mandy also finally secured her own apartment, which meant the start of visitation, so they ultimately found themselves in a situation where Mac was somehow seeing Brain Jr. more often than either of his parents. If someone had told him weeks ago that this would be the result of Dennis’s kid moving to Philly, he would’ve laughed in their face.

“This is just so _weird_ ,” Dee pointed out one night at Paddy’s, pouring the five of them their third shot of the night. Mandy had the kid Wednesday through Friday and every other weekend, so that gave Dennis three nights a week to work the bar in addition to his day job. “Never in my life did I think I’d see you become a desk jockey.”

Dennis shrugged, tipping back his tequila shot expertly. “Yeah, well, it’s boring as shit, but owning and operating a failing bar isn’t exactly gonna pay the child support,” he said. He side-eyed Frank. “Unless someone wants to make some contribution to the raising of his grandson.”

Frank scoffed, waving Dennis off. “Please, you’re not my kid,” he said. Dennis rolled his eyes, but didn’t look particularly surprised.

“How’d you even get a _real_ job, anyway?” Charlie asked. “How are you like, qualified?”

“Well, unlike the rest of you losers, I actually have a college degree,” Dennis said dryly. “And I had a data entry job back in North Dakota, so I have experience.”

Mac blinked in surprise. He hadn’t known that. He had a bad thought, suddenly, as he recalled a conversation he and Dennis had previously. “Are you sure you wanna get back into that, man?” he asked, very carefully. “You— you know, you hated North Dakota.”

Dennis gave him a long look. His eyes were a little unfocused, and Mac attributed that to the amount he’d had to drink. “That was different. Back then I had to leave my shithole job just to go back to my shithole pull-out bed in Mandy’s shithole living room. Now I get to go home to—” he said, before pausing abruptly. He tore his gaze away from Mac. “Our place.” Mac just shrugged, satisfied enough.

And so, things calmed down a little, and they fell into a routine. Mac watched the kid every day, until either Mandy came to pick him up or Dennis came home and they did boring little kid shit like watch Spongebob or play with Legos. He practiced cooking a lot, and Dennis seemed to be practicing eating like a normal person as a result, so Mac chalked that one up as a win. Overall, Mac wasn’t completely unsatisfied with the situation. He kind of liked it, even. He had fun with the kid, and Dennis was much more nicer to him than he had been for a really long time. It was sort of like a glimpse into the cute domestic life Mac was going to have someday.

“Man, I don’t know how you’re pulling off raising a kid,” Charlie said, his voice partially obscured by the loud action music blasting through the laser tag course. Mac had convinced Charlie to tag along with him and Brian to Fun Zone, and although technically Brian was too young to actually play, they’d stuffed his shoes with toilet paper and told the teenage employee that he was eight. Whether or not she’d actually believed it was up for debate, but she didn’t seem to really care enough to argue. “It seems like just yesterday we were beating the shit out of a bunch of middle schoolers for stealing our bikes.”

Mac shushed him quickly. “Don’t— we agreed to not bring that up, ever,” he hissed. “And I’m not _raising_ anything. He’s Dennis’s kid, I’m just— he needs my help, so I’m helping.”

Charlie shrugged. “I dunno, man,” he said, unconvinced. “When we were at the snack bar, he called you _Dad_. He was all, get a corn dog for my dad, and I was like, what? Dennis isn’t here? But then like, I realized he meant you.” Mac groaned.

“Yeah, he— he does that. I’m working on it,” he muttered. He suddenly caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and he pulled out his gun and stood in front of Brain before the kid on the opposing team could shoot at him. “Don’t even think about it, you little shit.”

“Well, whatever, man,” Charlie said, blasting the kid with his gun as he scurried away. “I think you should totally embrace it. This is what you always wanted, right?”

Mac glanced over at where Brian was waddling a little ways in front of them, his vest swallowing up his entire body as he aimlessly shot all over the course. Mac huffed out a laugh. “I guess,” he said. “Hey, watch him for a minute, I’ll be right back.”

Mac jogged over to the nearby base, putting his hands up in surrender as the kid guarding it turned his gun on him. “Woah, woah, don’t shoot. I have a proposition,” he said, reaching for his wallet. “I’ll give you ten bucks if you let my kid blast the shit out of you.”

At the end of the game, they all met up back at the base to look at the scoreboard, along with the ten other little prepubescent dorks on their team. “Dad, look!” Brian said excitedly. “B-R-I-A-N… I winned!”

Mac sighed. “Brian, I’m not—” he said, before he caught Charlie’s expression and stopped in his tracks. He shook his head, grinning and holding his fist out for Brian to bump it. “Good job, buddy. Come on, let’s go spend your Fun Zone dolla dolla bills.”

The whole babysitting gig was pretty short-lived, however, because before Mac knew it the kid was starting kindergarten. Mac still drove him to and from school on the days he was with them, though, since Dennis’s job was on the complete opposite end of downtown and he refused to let Brian take the bus. “It’s filthy, and full of filthy city kids, you know? Plus, I don’t trust school bus drivers. Me and Dee’s used to offer us cigarettes when we were twelve,” he said. Mac had been surprised, at first, by how much of an overprotective parent Dennis could be, but he was getting used to it by now. “You’ll be here, anyway, so it works out. I’ll just leave the Rover and Uber to work. But I swear to god, if you get even a scratch on it, I will blow _you_ up with the RPG.”

So Mac went back to working the bar during the day, without Dennis. It was exactly what he’d been afraid of, when he’d initially learned that the kid was moving back to Philly: Dennis being gone again. Having to go through life without him being _right there,_ something that he’d become embarrassingly dependent on over the past few decades. That year he’d been North Dakota had been the worst of Mac’s life, and the possibility of having to once again live with that palpable absence scared him more than anything. But, now that it was happening, now that he was once again driving to the bar alone and being greeted by three familiar faces instead of four and coming up with half-assed schemes that were always one man short, it was… fine. It was fine, because he knew that later he would go pick up Brian and take him home, and he would cook dinner while Dennis and Brian attempted to finish their two-thousand-piece Lego Millennium Falcon, or on Mandy’s days Dennis would show up at the bar after work and everything would be just like it used to be. It was different, but Dennis had been right. It was good different.

Too good, honestly, and Mac should’ve been more wary of that. There was a reason he’d been afraid of change for so long. He’d always known, ever since he was fourteen years old and realized he was way more fixated on Stallone’s abs in Rocky than most boys his age, that living the life he wanted to live was going to have consequences.

“Mac Dad?” Brian asked him one day on their drive home, shortly after Mac had picked him up from school. Mac sighed. He’d eventually accepted defeat on getting the kid to stop calling him dad, so they’d come to a sort of compromise. “What’s a faggot?”

Mac nearly nearly had a stroke, slamming on the brakes right before he rear ended the car in front of him. Jesus Christ, he was not ready to deal with this right now. Or ever. “ _Shit_ ,” he breathed. He met Brian’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. “Where did you hear that?”

Brian shrugged, looking a bit nervous, like he knew something was wrong without really knowing _what._ “Ethan at school,” he muttered, his little baby voice shy and quiet. “He said since I have two dads, that means—”

“Okay, got it, don’t say it again,” Mac cut him off quickly, running a hand through his hair. “Don’t ever say that word, okay? It’s a bad word, a really bad one, about people like… like me.”

Brian frowned. “Like you and daddy?” he asked, confused. Mac groaned.

“No, no, just me. Actually, you should probably not tell your dad about this, ever,” he said. He sighed deeply. “Look, Brian, you know how boys and girls love each other and get married, sometimes? Well, sometimes that happens with two boys, or two girls. For me… I’m only gonna love and get married to other boys. And some people aren’t okay with that, so they say that mean word about me, and other people like me. Get it?”

Brian seemed to understand, to some extent, because his face fell dramatically, and Mac was horrified for a moment that he was going to start crying. “I don’t want people to say mean words about you,” he said. Mac felt his chest burn, and he wasn’t really sure if it was with affection or shame.

“Dude, calm down, it’s fine. I’m used to it,” Mac muttered. “Don’t get upset, just don’t ever say it, okay? Unless, I guess, you end up being gay, then you’re allowed. Which would be really cool, actually. But I’m not in the business of pushing agendas.”

Brian sniffled. “I’m gonna tell Mrs. Smith on Ethan,” he said. Mac shook his head.

“No, no, you don’t worry about this. I’ll take care of it,” he said, pulling out his phone. “I’m gonna set up a meeting with Ethan’s dad and have a nice chat with him tomorrow, okay? We’ll get it all sorted out.”

Later the next day, when Dennis walked into Paddy’s after work, he was greeted to the sight of Mac holding a frozen beer can against his eye. He paused for several moments, and Mac desperately hoped that this would be one of the times where he would just brush it off and continue on with his day. It was a hope in vain.

“Who punched you?” Dennis asked right away, narrowing his eyes at him.

Mac scoffed. “Who said I got _punched?_ ” he asked with an eyeroll. “I’ll have you know—”

“He got punched,” Dee said.

“Yeah, he got punched good,” Charlie added. Mac flipped them both off.

“Okay, fine, there was an… altercation. But I totally won, dude, you should’ve seen the other guy,” Mac said, puffing up his chest. “Sure he got _one_ good hit in, but I messed him up, seriously.”

Dee rolled her eyes. “So he says,” she muttered. Dennis chuckled, cracking open a beer.

“How did that happen?” he asked. “Did you actually do your job as a bouncer for once?” Mac rubbed the back of his neck.

“No, ah, it was kind of in the principal’s office at Brian’s school?” he said sheepishly. Dennis’s expression immediately morphed from amused to alarmed. “Okay, so, long story short, some kid taught Brian the F slur, so I set up what was meant to be a calm, rational meeting with the kid’s piece of shit conservative dad, and ended up throwing the fuck down. And winning. Oh, but he’s suing me, so, uh, Frank, I’d really appreciate it if you could hook me up with a lawyer. A good one, because I am definitely at fault.”

Frank just nodded. “Yeah, sure, I know a guy,” he said. If anything good came out of that dance in the prison, it was that Frank had become pretty decent as far as gay allies went.

Dennis shifted uncomfortably. “Dude, come on, you can’t just go around beating up random dudes who say slurs by proxy of their children,” he said. “Don’t take everything so personally.”

Mac blinked. “Oh, it was personal, though,” he said. “The kid was talking about me when he said it.”

Dennis paused, his expression darkening slightly as he allowed the information to sink in. “How do kindergarteners at Brian’s school know you’re gay, Mac?” he asked slowly. Mac sighed. This was where things got uncomfortable.

“You know how Brian is, dude, he’s all confused about our whole situation and everything,” he said. “He probably told his classmates he had two dads, and they brought it home and heard their parents being asshole bigots about it.”

Dennis ran a hand through his hair. “Great, that’s great. Awesome. So that’s it, we’re Brian’s faggot dads,” he said, clearly no longer seeing any amusement in the situation whatsoever. “And now my kid is coming home saying slurs because, apparently, people are being homophobic through their _kids_ now. God _dammit._ ”

The rest of the gang seemed to notice the tension increasing, because they made quick work of pretending to be busy and extracting themselves from the situation. “Dennis, chill, dude, I handled it,” Mac said, waving him off. “It’s not a big deal. I get called shit all the time.”

“That— _that_ is a big deal, Mac! How is it not a big deal?” Dennis said exasperatedly. “My kid is being exposed to this shit at age _five_ simply because his _dad’s roommate_ is gay. What the _fuck?_ ”

Mac raised an eyebrow. “Okay, what is this really about?” he asked. Dennis laughed in disbelief.

“What is this about? I don’t know, man. Maybe it’s about you,” he said, his frustration palpable. “Maybe it’s about how you think you can get buff and flex and punch people and it’ll just make all of this go away. You think you’re all big and tough, huh? You think you’re so brave for coming out? Well, maybe if you’d just stuck to banging chicks you wouldn’t get fucking hate crimed by five year olds.”

Mac stood up off of his bar stool. “Fuck you, dude,” he said, calm but forceful. “You’ve been working all day and you’re tired, so I’m gonna pretend you didn’t say that, but you need to stop talking.”

Dennis scoffed. “Don’t tell me what to do. Or what, you’re gonna fight me too?” he said dryly. “God, you know what, you wanted to know why I left? This is why. Because I just couldn’t stand _this_ anymore.”

“Stand _what_ anymore?” Mac demanded, raising his voice.

“Stand _you!_ ” Dennis snapped back. “The way you— you looked at me and talked to me and touched me and bought me fucking RPGs and wanted to raise my kid with me, it was all just so goddamn annoying. I hated it. I hated you.”

Mac took a step back. He had gotten used to this, this complete irrational anger that Dennis would hit him with out of nowhere, but he’d really thought things were changing between them. He’d thought they were getting _better._ “Dennis…” Mac said, but he wasn’t sure how to continue from there.

“Whatever. I have to— I’m going,” Dennis said, slamming his beer down on the bar before heading back out the door.

After a few beats of silence, Dee whistled lowly. “That was awkward,” she said. “Want a shot?”

“Jameson,” Mac agreed with a nod, tipping it back the second she placed it in front of him.

Mac dealt with it the same way he dealt with everything: by getting really drunk and pretending it didn't bother him. Dennis wasn’t there when he got back to the apartment late that night, so he drank beer until he physically passed out on the couch, and then woke up at noon and drank more. Thank god it was Mandy’s day with the kid. 

Dennis didn’t come home after work, either, not that Mac had expected him to. He made dinner anyway and put the leftovers in the fridge. He turned on Kindergarten Cop again, because they still had the rental for another three days and it was actually pretty good, despite there being no shirtless scene.

And then, at around midnight, Dennis came home. Because he always came home.

“Hey,” Mac said. Dennis paused near the couch.

“Stand up,” he said. Mac did. Dennis put a hand on each side of his face and kissed him.

Mac’s brain shut down immediately. He wasn’t sure whether he kissed back or not, because all of a sudden his body and his mind were on completely different planes of existence. Dennis pulled back after a few moments, searching Mac’s face for something. “Okay?” Dennis asked.

Mac hesitated to respond. Was it? Probably not. He didn’t care. “Yeah. Okay,” he said, grabbing the back of Dennis’s hair and pulling him back in with a desperation he didn’t know he had in him.

Half an hour later, and Mac was staring up at his bedroom ceiling, his mind racing as it tried to process everything. “Well,” he said, a bit breathlessly. “That was… not what I was expecting to happen. I thought you were gonna come home and we were gonna scream at each other or something. I’m still really mad at you, by the way.”

Dennis shifted his body to face him. “Really?” he asked, his eyebrows raised in disbelief. “Even though I gave you head?” Mac rolled his eyes.

“Yes, dude. Head doesn’t solve everything,” he scolded. Dennis frowned deeply.

“In my experience, that’s not true,” he said. Mac glared at him for several long moments, before he finally sighed in defeat. “Fine, look, I didn’t mean what I said, okay? You— you already know I didn’t. And… I’m sorry.”

Mac blinked, somewhat surprised. He could count the number of times Dennis had genuinely apologized to him on one hand. “Oh. I forgive you, man,” he said. They lied there for several moments in heavy silence. Mac wracked his brain for the right way to bring up what he wanted to ask. “I didn’t know you were gay.”

Dennis groaned, pulling a pillow over his face. “Really, do we have to do this right now?” he muttered. “I should’ve known you’d be the type who likes to talk after sex.” Mac smacked him lightly on the arm.

“Dude, come on, you can’t just brush this one off,” he scolded. “ _You_ and _me_ just banged. That’s a huge deal. We’re gonna talk about it.” Dennis sighed long-sufferingly.

He dragged the pillow off of his face, very slowly. “I hooked up with guys in college. Like, exclusively,” he muttered, not looking Mac in the eye. “But after a while I decided it wasn’t worth it. The— the way people treated me, the name-calling bullshit, it was just— it was fucking annoying, you know? I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. So I stopped.”

Mac blinked. “Stopped being gay?” he asked, perplexed. Dennis shrugged.

“I guess,” he said. They were quiet again.

“That’s _awesome_ ,” Mac finally said, excitedly. “I mean, not that you got hate crimed into being straight, that kind of sucks. But like, awesome for me, because we’re both gay and you’re really good at sex. Uh, unless this was like a one-time thing?” Dennis rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, Mac, that’s what this is. I just upended my life and slept with my best friend of three decades because I wanted some ass,” he said, deeply sarcastic. Mac furrowed his brow.

“Okay…” he said, thinking hard. Dennis was so hard to figure out sometimes. “So, what, you wanna be like, boyfriends?”

Dennis took a long pause. “Is that what you want?” he asked calmly.

“Yes,” Mac replied, almost before Dennis had finished asking the question. “Yes, absolutely yes, I wanna be boyfriends. Let's do that. I’m in.”

Dennis closed his eyes and huffed out a small laugh. “Okay, then,” he said.

They fell back into silence. Mac stared at the ceiling for a long time, allowing everything to slowly process.

“You know what, dude? This is great. It’s perfect,” he suddenly said, sitting up excitedly. “Because, I mean, I _do_ still believe that for a child to be properly nurtured it should be raised by a man and a woman, as God intended—”

“ _Seriously?_ ” Dennis cut him off exasperatedly. “You’re openly gay and you’re still saying shit like that?”

Mac held up a hand to silence him. “Shh. Listen,” he said, before continuing unphased. “Obviously Brian Jr. already had that going for him, but I was a little concerned about the _love_ part. The absence of love between a child’s parents can be really damaging, as we both know. But now, _now_ Brian Jr. can have both! He has both male and female parents _and_ parents who love each other, which almost _never_ happens in modern society. So this is like, the ideal situation to raise a kid in, pretty much.”

Dennis stared at him for a long time. Mac waited patiently for the genius of his thought process to dawn on him. “You love me?” is what he finally asked, his voice quiet. Mac let out a surprised laugh.

“Oh, duh,” he said, waving Dennis off. “I mean, I think I probably had that shit buried deep since I thought you were _obnoxiously_ straight and it was never gonna happen in a billion years, but now that we just had sex and you’re telling me you’re all gay for me and stuff, yeah, it’s a no-brainer. Of course I love you.”

Dennis looked away, his expression a mix of confusion and disbelief. “Huh,” he said thoughtfully. He paused. “And since when are you Brian’s parent? Kind of a weird thing to self-proclaim.”

Mac scoffed. “Are you kidding? That is _absolutely_ my kid too,” he said, with confidence. “The only reason I denied it before was because I thought you’d get all weird about it, but now that we’re a couple, I’m totally his dad. There’s nothing you can do about it.” Dennis rolled his eyes, but he was smiling, which Mac saw as a win.

He’d kind of thought that dating Dennis would be like a dream, one of those really, really good ones that made you horribly depressed when you woke up and realized it wasn’t reality. It wasn’t like that, though, not really. It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy, he _was_ , he was more happier than he’d ever been in his whole entire life, probably, but overall things weren’t really all that different. They still spent every possible moment together, and depended on each other to an abnormal degree, and did all kinds of stupid shit together when they weren’t busy being parents. They started up monthly dinners again, except now instead of going home afterward and watching sports they would go home and bang. Mac was allowed to touch and kiss Dennis all the time now without him getting all pissy, which was awesome, even though he did still flinch away sometimes when they were in public or where other people could see. They were working on it.

“You know,” Dennis said one night, burying his face in Mac’s bare chest as Mac ran his fingers through his hair. They’d officially transformed Mac’s room into Their Room at some point, and turned Dennis’s into Brian’s, which meant the tragic loss of all of Mac’s Jesus paraphernalia. It was a sacrifice he was willing to make. “We should’ve been doing this forever, man.” That just about summed up Mac’s feelings on the subject.

Despite the fact that she had her own place, Mandy still came around all the time, presumably because she didn’t want Brian to have a typical divorced-parents lifestyle. Mac supposed that made sense, seeing as she put such an insane amount of effort into making sure he wasn’t raised by a single mom. He admittedly hadn’t liked her much at first, and had even been kind of jealous of the fact that she and Dennis had something connecting them that Mac would never be apart of, but as it turned out, she was an extremely difficult person to hate. She was just so _nice_ , and understanding, and even seemed to have already accepted the whole _Mac being Brian’s third parent_ thing without it needing to be brought up. Which made sense in hindsight, since it had, technically, been her idea in the first place, back when he and Dennis had just been _pretending_ to be a couple. Life was funny that way. 

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you fellas about,” she brought up one day after dinner. Mac had made pot pie, because he was totally an expert chef now, and Brian had helped him with chopping the vegetables until Mandy had intervened and calmly told Mac to never let the five year old use a butcher’s knife again, please. “It’s about Junior’s name.”

Mac and Dennis exchanged a glance. “Oh, yeah,” Dennis said. “We should probably get around to changing that.”

“Right,” Mac agreed. “Kinda weird that he’s still named after the random dude who died behind our bar, huh?”

Mandy blinked. “He— what?” she asked, alarmed. Mac glanced at Dennis.

“Oh, you didn’t tell her that?” he asked sheepishly.

“Let’s move past it,” Mandy said quickly, waving them off. She was really getting the hang of how they operated. “Anyway, are we just gonna go with Brian Reynolds? Or I suppose we could go with Dennis Reynolds and keep the junior…”

“God, no, don’t name the poor kid Dennis,” Mac said, ignoring Dennis’s high-pitched objection. “Besides, he’s already been Brian for five years of his life. Brian Reynolds is good.”

“If I may,” Dennis interjected, still looking irritable due to Mac’s comment. “I’ve actually been thinking about this. I think he should be Brian McDonald.”

The declaration was met with stunned silence. Mac stared at him with wide eyes, the gears in his brain turning very slowly. “Well, I just hadn’t even thought of that!” Mandy said brightly. “I’ll leave it up to you two, but I’m okay with it if that’s what you decide on.”

“Woah, woah, hold on,” Mac said. “I know I shoehorned my way into this family, and I’m not sorry about that, but isn’t this going too far? I’m not _actually_ his dad.”

Dennis and Mandy both gave him a strange look. “Well, we say you are, so you are,” Dennis said dryly. “So don’t overthink it and just say yes or no.”

“But _why?_ ” Mac asked in disbelief. Dennis shrugged.

“Because I don’t give a shit about the stupid, you know, passing on my legacy thing, and I know you do,” he said. “Besides, Frank isn’t even my real dad. There’s no reason to give his name to my kid.”

Mac felt himself getting choked up, embarrassingly, so he took a long drink of beer to swallow it down. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“Well, why don’t we ask the man himself?” Mandy said cheerfully. She called for Brian, who was in the living room watching Pokémon. He scurried into the kitchen and let himself be pulled onto her lap. “Hey, Junior, you know how we talked about gettin’ you a new name? What do you think about Brian McDonald?”

Brian wrinkled his little baby forehead, like he was thinking very hard. “I like McDonald’s,” he finally said.

“Well, there you have it,” Dennis said with a grin. Mac laughed, and if it was a little watery, no one mentioned it.

Later, after Dennis had seen Mandy and Brian out of the apartment, he sat across from Mac at the table and gave him a long, weighted look. Mac raised an eyebrow. “What’s up?” he asked.

“We should get married,” Dennis said calmly. Mac paused, the spoonful of Cocoa Puffs he was eating for dessert stopping halfway to his mouth. 

“What?” he asked, his brain not responding quite as quickly as he wanted it to. Dennis shrugged.

“You know, it just seems like… like this is gonna end up being pretty permanent, yeah?” he said, gesturing between the two of them. “And I mean, we already live together and share a bank account and have a kid who calls both of us dad. It just— it makes sense for us to lock it down, don’t you think?”

Mac stared at him. “Uh, okay,” he said blankly. Dennis finally made eye contact, looking at him expectantly. Mac raised an eyebrow. “Wha— wait, hold on, are you _proposing_ right now?”

Dennis scoffed. “No, come on, don’t make it a whole ordeal,” he said tiredly. “I just— I’m asking you to agree to what I’m saying, so we can, y’know, go down to the courthouse on one of our free days. Sign some papers and get it over with.” Mac gaped at him.

“No, no no no. Are you serious? No,” he said, visibly offended. Dennis sighed deeply. “What, you want me to be Maureen Ponderosa part two? Hell no, asshole! I have been waiting my whole life for this, I am getting fucking proposed to! And we’re gonna have a wedding, a real wedding, in a Catholic church, obviously, and Bry’s gonna be our ring bearer and you’re gonna cry at the altar when I read my vows, goddammit!”

Dennis scrubbed a hand over his face. “Well, you’ve clearly thought about this,” he muttered flatly. “They’re not gonna let us get gay married in a Catholic church, Mac.” Mac waved him off.

“I have some pull, I’ll get us in there,” he said casually. “Anyway, I’m done having this conversation. If you wanna propose to me, do it, but don’t come at me with this lazy ass courthouse bullshit.”

Dennis rolled his eyes. “Jesus christ, dude,” he said under his breath. With an exasperated sigh, he reached over and pulled the tamper-evident band off of the milk jug before dropping down to one knee. “Alright, fine, this is happening.”

Mac stared at him with wide eyes. “Holy shit,” he said, the reality of the situation finally dawning on him. Dennis held up the makeshift ring.

“Listen very closely, okay? Because I’m only gonna say this once, and then you will never get it out of me ever, _ever_ again,” he said, very seriously. He took a deep breath. “Mac, I— I know that I spent a lot of time pushing you away and convincing you this was never gonna happen, but I need you to know… it was never because I didn’t want it, okay, not ever. I always have. And I do mean always, I think probably from the moment I met you under the bleachers in high school, but I just… I never really let myself acknowledge it, because, well, you know how fucked up I am when it comes to feelings. So I buried that shit, but at the same time I couldn’t handle you not being in my life, so I asked you to live with me and go in on Paddy’s and basically subjected myself to over twenty years of torture because I’m a goddamn coward. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is— and I will _literally_ kill you if you ever repeat this to anyone— I, well, I’ve loved you from the moment I met you, man. Seriously. And I think I’ve known for a long time that all I want is to be with you forever. So, if you want that too… Mac McDonald, you should— you should marry me.”

Mac blinked quickly, forcing back whatever embarrassing unmanly tears were threatening to make an appearance and clearing the lump from his throat. “Wow, Den,” he said softly. “High school? I don’t… the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind until we were like, thirty. I had no idea it was like that for you.”

Dennis huffed. “Great, well. That’s not really an answer,” he said. “This tile is killing my knees, hurry it up.”

Mac let out a choked laugh, reaching down to grab the plastic milk band engagement ring. He stuck it on his finger, for symbolic purposes, obviously, since it was as big as three of his fingers put together and he wasn’t actually planning to wear garbage on his hand for the rest of his long married life. “Yeah, bro,” he said, finally. “Yeah, let's get married.”

Dennis grinned, in that rare soft, relieved way that Mac loved. “Cool,” he said, his voice light.

“You’re gonna be Dennis McDonald, though.”

“Well, there’s just no way in hell.”

Mac snorted, placing his hand over Dennis’s as he got back into his seat. “I know you know this, but I love you, too. A lot,” he said. “More than anything ever, I think. Oh, except for maybe Brian.”

Dennis’s eyes brightened in a way Mac had never seen them before at the words. He looked so shockingly, genuinely happy that Mac barely recognized him. It was at that moment that Mac realized it was never a competition between himself and the kid; Dennis’s hole was never going to be filled in North Dakota without Mac, or in Philly without Brian, because it was going to be filled by both of them, together.

“Cool,” Dennis said again, his voice cracking a little.

And so, they moved forward. Mac had always been of the opinion that time went by pretty slowly, especially as the years went on and they became more and more ingrained in their routines. He felt like he’d spent two lifetimes in that bar, coming up with schemes and spending time with the same four people and never really making any progress in life. And he’d been okay with that, really. It had never really occurred to him that there could ever be anything else.

Things were different with the kid, though. Watching a little human grow and change was like hitting fast-forward, and it was almost scary how quickly time seemed to go by. It was like Brian woke up one day and was suddenly up to Mac’s armpit instead of his waist, and was capable of using words like _approximately_. He could write his own name, as well as _Daddy_ and _Mommy_ and _Mac Dad_ , which he practiced often on the insane amount of drawings that now covered the entire surface area of their fridge. He was left-handed, like Mac, and although he knew that obviously had nothing to do with genetics, it made Mac happy regardless.

It wasn’t just Brian, either. Mac had a steadily accumulating amount of gray hairs in his beard, which he’d eventually given up on plucking and allowed to run rampant. Dennis had them too, around his temples, but he dyed over them and made Mac swear on penalty of death that he wouldn’t tell anyone that they existed. His crow’s feet were getting more and more noticeable by the day, too, but Mac decided it was in both of their best interest to keep that to himself.

At some point they’d also acquired— at a Catholic church, as promised— two matching silver bands on their left hands, along with a vow to keep doing exactly what they’d already been doing for over two decades now, but for the rest of their lives. That was one change that Mac was really, really fond of.

Consequently, before Mac could even properly process the fact that Brian had graduated from kindergarten, he was pulling up in front of the elementary school to drop him off for the first day of first grade.

“Got your lunch, bud?” Mac asked, glancing at Brian in the rearview mirror. He nodded brightly, holding up the Thundergun lunch box Charlie had gotten him for his sixth birthday. “Awesome. Good luck on your first day. Let me know if I need to fight anyone’s dad, okay?”

Brian laughed in that way that made Mac feel all light and warm. “Okay,” he said, opening his door.

“Hey, Mac!” someone suddenly called, and Mac startled, looking around for the source. “Come on, Dylan brought his Switch, we’re gonna play Fortnite during recess!”

“Coming!” Brian shouted out the door, toward another kid waiting for him at the front steps. It took Mac a long moment of confusion to process what had just happened, before it hit him all at once like a kick to the chest that the kid hadn’t been talking to him. “Bye, Dad, I love you!”

Mac watched him go, his throat so thick with emotion that he almost couldn’t speak. “Yeah,” he finally forced out. “Love you too.”

He stayed in the school parking lot long after the bell rang, forcing himself to get it together. He was _not_ going to let his kid make him all soft and emotional, like in Big Daddy or Jersey Girl or one of those other feel-good found-family chick flicks. He took a few deep breaths, started up the Rover, and made his way toward the familiar route to Paddy’s.

Most of his day consisted of coming up with the logistics of some scheme Charlie came up with to get publicity for the bar. Something about pretending to get kidnapped so one of them could get their face on a milk carton, or something. Mac was blurry on the details. They were still arguing over who would be the kidnapping victim when Dennis showed up after work, immediately cracking himself a beer and joining in on the conversation like he’d been there the whole time.

“By the way, guys, I can’t be the one who flirts as a distraction this time,” Dennis said, holding up his left hand. “I’m married.” Mac grinned at him.

“You know what, Dennis, that’s fine, because this plan does not call for a distraction at all,” Charlie said exasperatedly. “Anyway, Dee, I really don’t think you’ve considered the fact that—”

“Hold on, that goes for me too,” Mac cut in. “I’m married too.”

Dee sighed loudly. “God, we know! We were at your stupid gay wedding!” she said.

“Seriously, are you guys gonna be like this all the time now? It’s so annoying,” Charlie said.

“Not because you’re gay married, though,” Frank chimed in. “You’re not annoying because you’re gay, you’re annoying because you’re you.”

“Right,” Dee agreed. “It’s not a gay thing, it’s a Mac and Dennis thing.”

Dennis glanced at Mac, his eyes bright as he grinned and gave him a small shrug. Mac smiled back, reaching out to take his hand and basking in the warm feeling that grew in his chest as their rings clicked together.

And so, they moved forward. Without really moving much at all.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on twitter where i complain about s15 not being greenlit @fiipadeiphia


End file.
